Please note: this is the author's version of the work. It differs in some minor details from the final article, which has been published in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung by Verlag Vittorio Klostermann. The original publication has the digital object identifier (DOI) 10.3196/004433016818285971 and is available at Ingenta Connect.

Please cite the article as: "Sandvik, Hanno 2016: [Book review of] Hans-Joachim Niemann: Karl Popper and the two new secrets of life, in: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 70, 141–144."

 

Book review

Hans-Joachim Niemann: Karl Popper and the two new secrets of life: including Karl Popper’s Medawar Lecture 1986 and three related texts,
157 S., Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2014.

Karl Popper may be the single most import figure in philosophy of science of the 20th century; however, he is not exactly known as a philosopher of biology. Although most biologists im- or explicitly follow a Popperian falsificationist methodology in their daily work, Popper is still remembered for having classified evolutionary biology as a “metaphysical research program” (and thus not proper science, or so at least he has been interpreted). After Niemann’s book, we should definitely re-evaluate Popper’s work: he was a philosopher of biology after all.
    The book consists of four previously unpublished texts by Popper (totalling 24 pages). They are preceded by a 114-page essay in which Niemann presents his interpretation of these texts plus some historical and biographical background.
    That Niemann makes Popper’s four texts available is an invaluable contribution to the philosophy and history of biology. The first text is a transcript of The First Medawar Lecture, entitled “A new interpretation of Darwinism”, which Popper held before the Royal Society of London in 1986. In this lecture Popper defends his “active Darwinism”, which entails that the “activity of the living organisms” is a “creative element in evolution” (p. 119). While several of the issues covered are explained in more depth in others of Popper’s publications, Niemann quite fittingly describes this lecture as a “legacy made by a philosopher aged 84 years who was in a hurry to sum up his philosophy of biology and evolution” (p. 61).
    In the second text, a short piece on “Lamarckism and DNA” (dated 1973), Popper sketches a hypothetical feedback mechanism by which a physiological state within a cell might lead to a change in the DNA. The third text is a short undated thought experiment, entitled “A world without natural selection but with problem solving”, in which Popper argues that adaptations are not “produced” by natural selection, but created by the organisms’ problem-solving activity. In the fourth text, a “Letter to a friend” from 1989, Popper is “putting nucleic acids into their place” by defending a view of the “gene–enzyme system” in which genes are “parts of the highly sensitive mechanism of self-regulation” (p. 135).
    It is interesting to see – and largely unrecognised – how well-informed Popper was about the current developments in evolutionary biology. Although Popper clearly exaggerated the “passiveness” of mainstream Darwinism, he championed recent theoretical breakthroughs which, at that time, were still minority views – or even anticipated future developments.
    Some of these intersections with current biological research are as yet unexplored and might have been the basis for interesting discussions. What Niemann does in his essay, however, is something completely different: in chapter I, he describes Popper’s contact to the “Theoretical Biology Club” in the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, and presents the members of this club. Chapter II explains the background and repercussions of Popper’s Medawar Lecture. Finally, in chapter III, Niemann sets out to back up and extend Popper’s active Darwinism with arguments of his own.
    The historical information presented by Niemann is often interesting and mostly relevant. On the other hand, Niemann’s discussion of, and contribution to, Popper’s active Darwinism is riddled with errors and misconceptions. To start with, his interpretation of Popper’s texts is severely flawed. This can be illustrated with at least one major misunderstanding per text:
    Regarding the Medawar Lecture, Niemann claims that Popper held that “‘... the idiosyncrasies and the preferences of individual organisms have played a far more important role in the history of evolution’ than natural selection(p. 63, emph. added) – when what Popper stated was that he “felt that the activities, the idiosyncrasies, and the preferences of individual organisms have played a far more important role in the history of evolution than Darwinists as a rule have admitted(p. 119, emph. added). Likewise, Popper’s sentence, “Darwin [...] believed that sexual selection was a kind of natural selection” (p. 127), is the source of Niemann’s sentence, “Darwin did not see clearly [...] that sexual selection contradicts the dogma about the survival of the best adapted” (p. 50) – when Darwin was painstakingly aware of this potential problem (and solved it in the way explained by Popper, pp. 127–28).
    In his interpretation of the third text, Niemann derives from Popper’s “natural selection produces nothing” (p. 132) that “natural selection is not the source of activity” (p. 93) – when it is natural selection that has ensured the ubiquity of activity by eliminating those organisms that exhibit no activity, too little activity or the wrong kind of activity.
    Niemann tries to enhance on Popper’s “gene–enzyme system” view by emphasising the role of cell division over DNA copying (pp. 98–101) – but does so based on the erroneous assumption that the women belonging to a common maternal line not only share their mitochondrial DNA, but that they “all have the same body cells” (p. 99).
    The most striking misreading concerns Popper’s note on “Lamarckism and DNA”, as is evident by comparing Popper’s original statements (p. 130) with the conclusions Niemann derives from them (p. 86; all emphases added). Where Popper speaks of “demand for a protein”, and obviously refers to a need for enzymes within a cell, Niemann takes him to speak about “lack of protein food in [the organism’s] habitat”. Where Popper speaks of “an enzyme[-]controlled feedback from RNA to DNA”, and obviously refers to a protein translating RNA into DNA (i.e., a reverse transcriptase), Niemann takes him to speak about “body signals” being “translated into an RNA code”. While Popper states that such a process “is not Lamarckism, but would in some ways resemble it”, Niemann claims that “Popper asserted [that this] process is, undoubtedly, an example of Lamarckian inheritance.”
    This treatment of Lamarckism, epigenetics and molecular biology seems to be the crucial part of the essay, but is very hard to follow. If I understand it correctly, it arrives at the following conclusion: knowledge acquisition by trial and error can take place at the protein level, and this knowledge can affect evolution, because it is transferred to the following generations via DNA. If true, this conclusion would indeed revolutionise biology. However, Niemann bases it on a couple of assumptions that are dubious at best:
    (i) He makes the extraordinary claim (p. 88) that “new knowledge can be learned by [...] the brain [...,] be changed into information [...] of a regulatory system, and then [...] enter the genome” – but the reference he cites does not support such a view (nor does any other source I know of).
    (ii) He claims that Popper has shown it to be logically impossible to acquire knowledge in an inductive way (pp. 83, 85, 87) – when what Popper has shown is the logical impossibility to infer the truth of any piece of knowledge using induction, which is an entirely different matter (remembering that all knowledge is fallible and most knowledge is false).
    (iii) Niemann maintains (p. 88) that “the new branches of molecular biology, called ‘epigen[et]ics’, ‘gene regulation’, and ‘evo-devo’, prove that the genome is learning [...] by information transfer” – when none of those mechanisms involves a direct change in the genome (i.e., in the DNA base sequence), but merely the differential expression or silencing of genes, which are already present and remain unaltered.
    (iv) Niemann points out that some acquired information is “inheritable when the cell reproduces itself” (p. 76, emph. added) – but fails to recognise that it is not thereby heritable when the organism reproduces itself (given that the organism is multicellular and non-modular, e.g., an arthropod or vertebrate).
    One is left wondering what Niemann’s agenda behind these – presumably unintended – distortions might be. It seems that he wishes to discredit standard (“passive”) Darwinism in order to pave the way for Popper’s (“active”) version of it. In doing so, however, he grossly misrepresents Darwinism. In contradistinction to Popper, who emphatically subscribed to Darwinism (p. 118), Niemann refers to it as a “disproved [...] dogma” (p. 51) and attributes to it rather strange features, such as: “Darwinism is the attempt to reduce biology to physics and chemistry” (p. 110). This will come as a surprise to practicing evolutionary biologists, and nothing like it is implied by Popper. Several other statements throughout the book reinforce the impression that Niemann has not actually understood natural (and sexual) selection.
    These misconceptions may explain why Niemann (p. 79) perceives a “contradiction between the [...] central dogma [of molecular biology] and the [...] fact that DNA contains a lot of knowledge about the world.” In a “world without natural selection”, there would indeed be such a contradiction – but not in our world.
    The backcover advertisement that, “After the Book of Genesis and Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Karl Popper established a third theory of evolution”, is embarrassingly off the mark. Popper himself never considered his thoughts more than “A new interpretation of Darwinism”, and even the novelty of his interpretation is partly debatable. Still, it establishes Popper as an insightful philosopher of biology.
    It is difficult to understand why the author (a chemist and philosopher) and the publisher did not ask for biological advice or quality assurance. Niemann deserves credit for having made these important texts of Popper’s publicly available. The biographical and historical parts of Niemann’s essay add further interesting details. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the biological part of his essay.

 

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